Christmas revelation: 2011 throwback.

image found here.

At Christmas last year, a lovely glass of Pinot Noir and some down home holiday cheer prompted me to confess writing to one of my uncles. This is the same uncle who used to tell us elaborate scary stories around the campfire every summer. It was a big kernel for Little Bird and her love of make-believe. Granted, none of us realized they were borrowed stories. Now the big joke at family gatherings is that, upon the awakening of adolescence, my cousins and I were all baffled to learn that Uncle Paul had stolen IT from Stephen King, and not the other way around.

After telling my uncle that I had written two novels (that is, a sh**ty first draft for each), he said, "That's great! *beams with premature pride* You know what I see you writing? Drama. Just a good, old-fashioned family drama."

My immediate thought: I kind of wish I was. How do you tell the uncle who introduced you to Stephen King that are you are not, in fact, writing any good, old-fashioned family dramas? It made me take a hard look at how I categorize my work. The knee-jerk label is "YA fantasy." That's what the market would call it. I don't feel any shame for this, but here's the thing:

"YA fantasy" is a just a classification. A classification that pulls me in like a magnet, but also, one that meant little-to-nothing (or, at least, not-at-all-the-same-thing) 50 years ago. At their core, don't all good stories, regardless of genre/demographic/any other definition, all come back to the play between comedy and tragedy?

You can't always go for the assumptions others make about you. I mean, why should any of us be bound by that? It's destructive. If I was bound by my grandmother's view of me, I'd have to be a genius, beautiful, social butterfly who loves everyone and everything, all the time, and is never sad. Spoiler alert: this is impossible.

But my uncle really struck a chord in me. Because after the initial shock of OH MY GOSH PLEASE DON'T ASK ME WHAT I AM WRITING (surprisingly, no one that night did), I realized...

Huh. Wait a minute. It is a family drama! Guised in a speculative world. How could he tell, without me even knowing?

Which got me to thinking about the *magic* in this story, and what purpose it serves. A good thing to consider, yeah? And also, why magic? Why fantasy?

A few findings: My characters don't use magic so much as experience it. And it is, without a doubt, the backbone of that family drama. For this story, it works. 

But, just as I can't be bound by what others think, I also can't be bound by my own blind definitions of self. A startling discovery: the VAST majority of story ideas I've been culminating since childhood are contemporary stories or magical realism. Almost all of them are dramas. Further startling discovery: my current WiP is the only flat-out fantasy idea that's ever taken up residence in ye olde cranium.

Interesting.

Merry Christmas!

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Also, this.

i couldn't resist. credit.